LED's in Headlamps

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Dredging this up from the past --

I wish they were brighter. Anyone ever try and crack open the lense and replace the LED's (or at least have a picture of what they look like opened up)?
 
ATL-FFE said:
Dredging this up from the past --

I wish they were brighter. Anyone ever try and crack open the lense and replace the LED's (or at least have a picture of what they look like opened up)?
Before people opening up their headlights, consider how much the replacement cost of the headlights. Does anyone know how much they cost?
 
ATL-FFE said:
I wish they were brighter.
Me too, and I wish they would also stop subtly flickering.

You can see the flickering glow from inside the car whenever you just have the LED eyebrows on by themselves when parked up against a white wall (like in your garage).

The flicker only happens while the ignition is on. Turn the ignition off, and the flickering instantly stops. Turn it back on, and it starts again.

Does anyone else notice this?
 
WattsUp said:
I wish they would also stop subtly flickering.

You can see the flickering glow from inside the car whenever you just have the LED eyebrows on by themselves when parked up against a white wall (like in your garage).

The flicker only happens while the ignition is on. Turn the ignition off, and the flickering instantly stops. Turn it back on, and it starts again.

Does anyone else notice this?
Yep! Our FFE has done this for the entire time we've had it.
 
Any downsides to just keeping on the low beams on all the time? Pretend to be Canadian or something.
 
Additional battery drain, and shortening of battery life.

Related to being Canadian, I had a co-worker back in the '90's who moved to the US from Canada, and he had a truck with DRLs. Being uncommon in the US at the time, he tended to attract the attention of the cops because his lights were on in the daytime.

empowah said:
Any downsides to just keeping on the low beams on all the time? Pretend to be Canadian or something.
 
The LED's, though weak, don't consume nearly any power. If I had to guess, I'd say somewhere around 90mA per side, judging them as roughly the same as a 60mm strand of LED's putting out under 100lm. So, 180mA total running load if you wire them up for full time use.

IIRC, the HID's consume 25w per side, for a total of a ~4A load.

The load from those HID's is fairly negligible compared to something like the heater or AC -- but the LED accents are an infinitesimal load compared.
 
Is there a way to make the LED strip above the headlights brighter? They seem much more dim than other Focus models from the same year. Makes me think they're wired to be brighter. I'm not sure why Ford kept them so dim, they dont draw much power.

Also, are you guys modding the LED strip to stay on all the time to avoid having to turn on/off the parking lights? It seems pretty easy just to turn the knob everytime I get in/out. I dont know if that alone is worth cutting up the car's wire harness, but to each his own. I'd cut it open if we could figure out how to make them a normal daytime LED DRL.
 
FYI if you really want the LEDs on all the time. If I remember correctly when you change the config in Focccus to "enable" DRL You can leave the parking lights on all the time and when you turn the car off they go off.
 
triangles said:
FYI if you really want the LEDs on all the time. If I remember correctly when you change the config in Focccus to "enable" DRL You can leave the parking lights on all the time and when you turn the car off they go off.

I dont have the "enable DRL" option.. Not that I see anyways. I looked in the manual and it just references them "if equipped" with no instructions. I did read that combustion Foci have the exact same headlights as us, but in Canada Ford was mandated to retrofit the headlights with brighter LEDs for the DRL function.. So if you look in the used market you might find one. On the ST forum, they say your car needs to be reprogrammed to get the brighter ones to work, but I recall reading somewhere that someone bought a used set of ST3 headlights and one was brighter than the other. Must have been Canadian.

EDIT: I thought you misspelled Focus, didn't realize there's a coding tool for a FFE. I'll do some googling..
 
Focccus: It's a super buggy Russian program. Be careful it may cause your car to brainwash you into voting for Trump.. LOL. I usually have to run it several times before it completes the read without errors. It basically just edits the car computers configuration file telling the computer what hardware your car has. Once you get it to read the config you should save an unaltered copy of the original config so you can always go back to the stock config in case you inadvertently change something you didn't intend to. Once you finally get the program to read the config from the car you can simply change variables via drop downs. This is how to "enable" DRL:

I use quotes for enable because the cars that actually have DRL have slightly different hardware. I would guess maybe an extra relay or two, but who knows? So enabling it in the config doesn't really enable it on the car. However you can sort of fake DRL by enabling it and leaving your parking lights on. When you turn the car off the parking lights turn off too when DRL is enabled so you don't accidentally leave them on and kill the 12V. I didn't like this so I put it back to stock config. Note: you can also enable global window open/close:

Another neat but mostly useless feature that allows you to open or close all windows with your fob. I say it's mostly useless because while you can lock/unlock your car from a football field away, global open/close doesn't work much farther than about 20ft from your car.

Anyway back to Focccus. It will cause a multitude of errors and DTCs that may initially freak you out that you've possibly bricked your car. Have no fear these DTCs are easily cleared with Forscan.
 
triangles said:
Focccus: It's a super buggy Russian program. Be careful it may cause your car to brainwash you into voting for Trump.. LOL. I usually have to run it several times before it completes the read without errors. It basically just edits the car computers configuration file telling the computer what hardware your car has. Once you get it to read the config you should save an unaltered copy of the original config so you can always go back to the stock config in case you inadvertently change something you didn't intend to. Once you finally get the program to read the config from the car you can simply change variables via drop downs. This is how to "enable" DRL:

I use quotes for enable because the cars that actually have DRL have slightly different hardware. I would guess maybe an extra relay or two, but who knows? So enabling it in the config doesn't really enable it on the car. However you can sort of fake DRL by enabling it and leaving your parking lights on. When you turn the car off the parking lights turn off too when DRL is enabled so you don't accidentally leave them on and kill the 12V. I didn't like this so I put it back to stock config. Note: you can also enable global window open/close:

Another neat but mostly useless feature that allows you to open or close all windows with your fob. I say it's mostly useless because while you can lock/unlock your car from a football field away, global open/close doesn't work much farther than about 20ft from your car.

Anyway back to Focccus. It will cause a multitude of errors and DTCs that may initially freak you out that you've possibly bricked your car. Have no fear these DTCs are easily cleared with Forscan.

This all sounds cool, but I'm a mac guy. Not going to buy a laptop just to do this. One day.
 
121gigawatts said:
triangles said:
Focccus: It's a super buggy Russian program. Be careful it may cause your car to brainwash you into voting for Trump.. LOL. I usually have to run it several times before it completes the read without errors. It basically just edits the car computers configuration file telling the computer what hardware your car has. Once you get it to read the config you should save an unaltered copy of the original config so you can always go back to the stock config in case you inadvertently change something you didn't intend to. Once you finally get the program to read the config from the car you can simply change variables via drop downs. This is how to "enable" DRL:

I use quotes for enable because the cars that actually have DRL have slightly different hardware. I would guess maybe an extra relay or two, but who knows? So enabling it in the config doesn't really enable it on the car. However you can sort of fake DRL by enabling it and leaving your parking lights on. When you turn the car off the parking lights turn off too when DRL is enabled so you don't accidentally leave them on and kill the 12V. I didn't like this so I put it back to stock config. Note: you can also enable global window open/close:

Another neat but mostly useless feature that allows you to open or close all windows with your fob. I say it's mostly useless because while you can lock/unlock your car from a football field away, global open/close doesn't work much farther than about 20ft from your car.

Anyway back to Focccus. It will cause a multitude of errors and DTCs that may initially freak you out that you've possibly bricked your car. Have no fear these DTCs are easily cleared with Forscan.

This all sounds cool, but I'm a mac guy. Not going to buy a laptop just to do this. One day.

Macs can run Windows.....
 
scottt said:
Macs can run Windows.....

If you own a copy of Windows. I'm not willing to buy an entire OS just to do this. Its probably the same price to buy an entire used laptop with Windows pre-installed.
 
121gigawatts said:
scottt said:
Macs can run Windows.....

If you own a copy of Windows. I'm not willing to buy an entire OS just to do this. Its probably the same price to buy an entire used laptop with Windows pre-installed.

I believe Wine ( https://www.winehq.org/ ) is available for MacOS - it might be worth a try. On my Linux box, focccus will at least start up and run on top of the Wine compatibility layer but I haven't actually tried to connect to my car and edit settings.
 
Piracy, the easy choice!®

:lol: In all seriousness windows is free. You can download the ISO from microsoft and the tools to put it on a thumb drive or burn it to a DVD if you like. The only drawback is you will have an annoying watermark on the screen until you register it (pay for it). If all you're using it for is to run a couple of diagnostic apps then you don't ever have to register it. This guy does exactly this with his computer test rigs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3bezYerYxQ
 
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